Hi folks
A week or so back we blogged
http://blog.schema.org/2011/11/using-rdfa-11-lite-with-schemaorg.html
about the new RDFa Lite work at W3C and support from schema.org for
the initiative.
A couple folks have reminded me that there are likely people on this
list who don't track the blog and might have missed this, so this is
just a quick note to close the loop.
We had over the last few weeks some discussion here about ways of
simplifying RDFa for publishers and authors. The result is that the
RDFa working group have taken those comments on board and made a few
tweaks to RDFa that remove the need for publishers to think through
"should I use rel= here? or property=?". Alongside some other
simplifications, Lite makes things significantly easier on authors and
publishers, while keeping things compatible with RDF and Linked Data.
While it might not seem ideal to have different syntaxes for data in
HTML, and the discussions were not always easy, I think in this case
we've seen something useful come from the different design priorities
and perspectives of RDFa, HTML5/Microdata and Microformats. Each is
gradually learning from the other, and I think this trend plus a
universal desire to protect publishers from complexity and having too
many ways to do the same thing, is some kind of progress.
The status now is that the RDFa group are finalising the Lite spec
(see blog URL above for links) but the basics are clear enough for
early-adopters and implementors to be looking very seriously at the
editor's draft specs.
cheers,
Dan
ps. my personal wishlist now is to see more tools and APIs that also
(as much as possible) hide syntactic diversity from folk who don't
need to think about it; e.g. APIs for consuming in-page structured
data...